Lexicons of Early Modern English (http://leme.library.utoronto.ca ; LEME, pronounced like “lemma”, that is, rhyming with “hem” and bearing a final unstressed e) currently offers tools to search, display, and offer bibliographical information about 617,000 word-entries in 181 lexical works from about 1475 to 1702. The University of Toronto Press publishes LEME, and the University of Toronto Libraries – Sian Meikle, LEME’s designer (currently Interim Director of Information Technology Services, Digital Library and Web Services) – hosts it (2006-). Serious researchers license the database for searching. The bibliography and one-off searches are free.

LEME transcriptions started in the late 1980s with John Palsgrave’s Lesclarcissement (1530) and Thomas Thomas’s Latin-English lexicon (1587). In 1996, 16 lexical texts were released freely online with a student-written search engine. A generous grant from the Canada Innovation Foundation via Geoffrey Rockwell’s TAPoR turned LEME into an SQL database and expanded it to 150 texts. Dr. Marc Plamondon (Nipissing University) was the programmer.

The unit of the EEBO-TCP collection is a book, but that of LEME is a single word-entry. In displaying a dictionary page, LEME shows only the headwords of the word-entries on that page. When clicked, the entire encoded entry opens. Normally, researchers run searches on the entire database. They enter words, phrases, or collocations for searching, and LEME delivers a chronological list of matching word-entries, each abbreviated but expandable. We do not publish digitized books and so do not compete with scholarly editions or even EEBO-TCP itself.

We enter, proofread, and encode lexical texts to be added to the database each year. In this respect, LEME resembles a journal publication. Since 2006, LEME has increased in size by about 20 percent. Lancashire is editor, assisted by dedicated students. Recently, Zhao transcribed Claudius Hollyband’s French-English dictionary (1593) and Lancashire is now editing John Thorie’s Theatre of the Earth (place-names; 1601, transcribed by Janet Damianopoulos), John Rider’s Bibliotheca Scholastica (1589), and Ortus Vocabulorum (Latin-English; 1500, now being transcribed by Zhao), as well as Guy Miège’s French-English and English-French dictionary (1677) and Thomas Blount’s Nomo-Lexikon (law; 1670). The first four are newly transcribed, and the second two are adapted from EEBO-TCP transcriptions.

LEME delivers explanations and translations of English words written by men alive in the Early Modern English period. LEME is different from the OED: the two overlap by less than five percent, and LEME does not devise its own word-entries. The database shows the size of English vocabulary, information on when words entered the language, typical transcriptions of Early Modern English words, word-senses that were dominant at the time, hard and easy words, synonyms or translations in non-English languages, and evidence of which terms then in foreign languages had no English equivalent (LEME records words in 37 different languages and serves researchers in Renaissance Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish). LEME has an interest in any historical dictionary that includes Early Modern English.

When we adapt an EEBO-TCP transcription like Miège’s (using its source text), we replace its tags by our own private tag-set. We encode word-entries rather than display features. The LEME tag-set identifies the word-entry and, within that, its form (or headword), its explanation, their subforms and sub-explanations, and the language of all strings. Approximately eighty percent of the headwords in Miège’s contain subentries, and commonly there are 5-10 subentries under each headword. These illustrate idioms, common expressions, and related word-forms. For example, the French headword “Age” has close to thirty subforms, including

<subform lang="fr">Bas&acirc;ge,</subform> <subxpln lang="en">infancy, youth, tender years.</subxpln>

<subform lang="fr">Des mon bas &acirc;ge,</subform> <subxpln lang="en">from my In&shy;fancy.</subxpln>

Because all word-forms in Miège tend to be French, and all words in explanations tend to be English, we can use attributes within the form and explanation tags to label the language of those strings. Often, however, forms and explanations include strings in unexpected languages. To tag each word by its language, and by its role within a word-entry (form, explanation) is laborious and exacting.

Proofreading and correcting an EEBO-TCP transcription, and supplying its illegible characters – our first tasks — are much easier. EEBO-TCP transcriptions generally are well done. There are typos in its texts, but these occur in LEME too; and the conscientiousness of EEBO-TCP transcribers can be seen in how they signal illegible strings. In proofreading recent EEBO-TCP transcriptions, we have noted rare, unidentified astrological characters in James Moxon’s mathematical dictionary (1679); and, in Miège’s text, miskeying of circumflexes as grave accents, owing to worn or damaged typeface, as well as representation of digraphs ae and oe as two letters. Intentional non-transcription of Greek words might be mentioned here. With Unicode, identifying entity references for Greek letter-accent combinations is straightforward enough.

After proofreading and encoding, we process each text repeatedly to find tagging errors or inconsistencies. We use a programming text-editor such as UltraEdit or Notepad++ to enter and edit LEME texts. These offer search-and-replace functionality with regular expressions and macros. We also process each encoded text repeatedly with specially-written LEME software to flag bad characters, tagging errors, and inconsistencies. The LEME processing program, written in perl, automatically locates bad characters and tagging mistakes. It also lists all words by their language and offers a mock-up of the page-displays LEME gives.

In adapting EEBO-TCP texts we also place, in the lexeme attribute of our form or explanation tags, a modern-spelling, standardized form of a word-entry’s English headwords and translations (the infinitive for verbs, the nominative singular for nouns).  Our lexemes normally follow the OED headword. LEME also supplies information that can supplement the OED, such as unrecorded word-forms, antedatings, etc. Here are examples from two recent French-English dictionaries, the first by Claudius Hollyband in 1593 (not in EEBO-TCP), and the second by Guy Miège in 1677 (from the invaluable EEBO-TCP transcription).

<wordentry type="h">
<form lang="fr">Bougre,</form>
<xpln lang="en">he that committed such a fact and sodomite villanie: a bug&shy;gerer: burne them all.
</xpln>
</wordentry>

<wordentry type="h">
<form lang="en">OROBE, a kind of pulse,</form>
<xpln lang="fr">oro&shy; be, ers, sorte de legume.</xpln>
<lemenote>Antedates earliest citation in the OED (1714).</lemenote>
</wordentry>

Together, these two texts have over 110,000 word-entries.

Early dictionaries have a well-earned place among our primary sources of information about Early Modern languages in Europe. They make for oddly delightful reading. We expect that researchers will want to edit and analyse dictionaries separately as literary influences. Ben Jonson regarded John Florio, the Italian lexicographer, as a “loving father and worthy friend,” and would have been influenced by the two editions of his World of Words (1598, 1611). Edward Phillips, Milton’s nephew, devised a hard-word dictionary (1658 and after) that, for example, might illuminate his uncle’s Paradise Lost if the two were concorded together. For that reason we try to send EEBO-TCP a list of corrected typos and of identifications of illegible words in those source transcriptions we adopt from it.

May 29, 2013

This post will outline one of TCP’s basic rules for marking up text, and how that rule affects what readers will see when using TCP texts. The basic idea behind this rule is function over form. In other words, TCP aims to capture structural information which will be useful for intelligible display, informed searching, and intelligent navigation. In this way we capture the content of each book, and the meaning/purpose of any special formatting, but do not exactly reproduce the look or specific style presented in the original printed work.  One slight exception to this rule is how we capture the information for title pages. The information contained in a title page tends to receive the highest frequency of searches, so we try to avoid cluttering it with markup and as such leave title pages relatively markup free, sometimes even removing unnecessary markup.

Take for example the following title page:

PDF. of title page

The above image is a simple title page. The markup for this title page is shown below in image 1:

Image 1. title page markup

In image 1. the <P> tags indicate where paragraphs start and end. No alterations are made to the spelling or the cases of the letters from the original image. However, you will notice in image 2., which shows how this text would display to the viewer, that certain visual elements from the original page are not captured in the TCP text:

Image 2. markup from Image 1. rendered.

Most notably, the font size is now uniform where in the original title page “London, Printed in the Yeer 1642.” appeared much smaller than the rest of the text.  Furthermore, the decorative illustration situated between the author’s name and the publication information is not represented in the TCP markup and thus does not appear when that markup is rendered to the viewer. The font sizes and decorative figures provide stylistic elements in the title page that, do not contribute directly to our ability to understand the content of the title page. Font size is standardized because noting subtle changes in font size would be cost effective in terms of the time it would take as compared to any benefits it would provide.   Another reason they are left out is because they are unlikely to be the subject of a search.

As a rule TCP does not capture detailed information about illustrations in text. This is because TCP is primarily concerned with text-based searches and analysis. However, figures that do more than decorate or divide the page are noted and can be searched.

Take for example the following image:

Image 3. title page with detailed image.

The illustration in image 3. would be represented in the text with very simple <FIGURE></FIGURE> tags.  If there was any text contained within the illustration, it would also be represented in <HEAD> within the <FIGURE>:

<FIGURE><HEAD>text here</HEAD></FIGURE>

Furthermore, editors may choose to add a very basic illustration description, especially if a illustration is highly detailed. Such a description might look like this:

<FIGURE><HEAD>text here</HEAD><FIGDESC>description here </FIGDESC></FIGURE>

However, this illustration has no text, and the editor did not see fit to add a description so it is simply represented in the markup as <FIGURE></FIGURE>:

Image 4. markup for text containing figure

Image 5. rendered text containing figure

As you can see in the above image, the only information conveyed here is that an illustration exists in a specific location on this page. If the viewer wishes to know more about the illustration they will have to pull up the EEBO page image for this text.  This is essentially a compromise: the primary objective for TCP is to create searchable texts. However, we recognize that illustrations, too, are important to a text and can add meaning. The editors account for this by notifying viewers that an illustration is present by capturing useful text associated with it, and by describing it when feasible.

Function over form can also be demonstrated with the ways that lists are coded. Take for example the page containing a list in Image 6:

Image 6. Lists

Image 7. markup for lists in Image 6.

Image 8. rendering of list from Images 6 & 7.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 

The Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership, based at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, invites proposals for conference papers. All papers that focus on early modern texts will be considered, but we particularly encourage proposals on digital research and editing methods and methodologies in early modern studies. Possible topics could include:

• Editing philosophies and practicalities
• Digital citation
• Hidden or developing research methodologies in the Humanities
• Bridging traditional and digital methods
• Comparative studies of different digital resources
• Research based on EEBO-TCP
• Digital tools to support early modern research
• Approaches to teaching methodology

The deadline for submissions is Friday 5 April 2013.

The conference is intended as an opportunity to explore the current state of early modern textual studies and editing, and to consider possibilities for the future. There will be a particular focus on developing potential for collaborative work through scheduled networking sessions. Proposals including project demonstrations or ideas are encouraged, as are submissions from postgraduate and early career researchers.

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words, together with a brief biography (100 words maximum), to eebotcp@bodleian.ox.ac.uk. Acceptances will be notified by Monday 29 April 2013.

You can download a digital copy of this Call for Papers.

We hope to see you in Oxford in September!

TCP is tucked away in a strip of the Hatcher Graduate library‘s third floor north stacks, in what is known as “the cage.” Even if you stumbled across the cage in your search for a book or journal housed in the Asia Library stacks, which share the third floor with TCP, it’s likely you wouldn’t know what we were all up to hard at work over our computers.  I first learned about the University of Michigan’s branch of TCP last summer while doing an internship funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), dealing with digital preservation for MLibrary. My supervisor at the time wanted me to have the opportunity to see the variety of work being done at the library, and on a visit to MPublishing I happened to meet the Text Creation Partnership Project Outreach Librarian Rebecca Welzenbach, who explained the project to me.

My personal interest in TCP stems from my educational background prior to coming to UM-SI. I did an MA in English at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute, where I specialized in Shakespeare and other early modern English dramatists.  I then chose to pursue a library science degree because while working towards my MA, I frequently used special collections and became increasingly interested in the stewardship of rare books and manuscripts and in using technology and digital media to create new ways of accessing and interacting with these materials. The TCP is an interesting fit for me because it combines my interest in early English texts with the technological aspects of creating access for the scholarly community that first sparked my interest in librarianship.

I’m still learning the ropes at TCP, but I’ve surprised myself with how much I’m truly enjoying the work.  The job of the TCP editors is vital, but can be tedious, as I had been warned before starting!  It’s true, there is a fair amount of repetition to the tasks to be carried out for each text we edit.  However, what I didn’t anticipate is that each text is like a little puzzle in need of solving, and this is what I enjoy so much about coming into work each day.  There are a total of 111 tags available to editors to use in marking up the structure of each book. Of these 111 tags 79 are specifically for textual markup and 32 for bibliographic information. However, most books only require 15-25 of these, used repeatedly. What is unique for each text is the way in which those tags are organized, labeled, and related to one another. It is our job as editors to determine their appropriate use.

“

From "Mikrokosmographia: or, A description of the body of man: being a practical anatomy"

The content of the texts is fascinating too. In addition to analyzing the structure of each book, editors are responsible for proofreading the transcriptions supplied by our vendors in order to ensure that they meet the required level of accuracy. We proofread selected samples of each text we’re working on, but from those alone you get a good sense of the books and the views of the people writing them.  Religious texts are probably the most common, which isn’t surprising given the time period (1475-1700), but since starting I have worked on texts covering a variety of different subjects. For example, I recently worked on an anatomy book, translated from Latin into English, which includes images of human figures holding back their skin to show the musculature underneath (shown left).

I know I still have a lot to learn, like how to write regular expressions, which will enable me to create targeted searches for quick editing. But that is part of what excites me the most about this work: everyday I am increasing my knowledge and understanding of early modern English books and early modern printing practices, as well as XML and electronic publications.

The publication of the proceedings of the conference “Revolutionizing Early Modern Studies”? The Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership in 2012, held in Oxford on the 17^th and 18^th September 2012, was a cause for great celebration for those of us involved in its organization. The conference coincided with the tenth year of production for the TCP in Oxford and it allowed us to reflect on the impact that the corpus has had on research and teaching in the early modern period, and to explore planned and potential developments for the future.

The conference was opened by Dr Richard Ovenden, Associate Director of the Bodleian Libraries, who has been an important advocate for the TCP since its inception. Richard introduced our keynote speaker, Dr John Lavagnino of King’s College London, who delivered a superb survey of “Scholarship in the EEBO-TCP Age”. John set the tone for the whole conference by exploring the philosophical questions and practical challenges of digital scholarship. He explained the importance of the TCP production model – transcribed rather than OCRed text – and considered the kinds of work that the corpus allows scholars to do, either uniquely in digital rather than print form, or very significantly faster than previously possible. John also introduced what would become a recurring theme in the conference – that EEBO-TCP is “everywhere in early modern studies, though largely hidden: overt citation and discussion are minimal”. This citation problem has been followed up recently in a SECT project focus group on digital citation, and research methodologies in the humanities remains a topic ripe for further discussion.

The first panel, EEBO-TCP: Practice and Potential, was opened by Becky Welzenbach, the TCP’ s Outreach Librarian, who gave delegates an overview of the current state of the TCP. She was followed by Martin Mueller who presented a thought-provoking talk outlining his work on linguistic annotation of the TCP corpus, looking in particular at his work on MorphAdorner. Martin subsequently wrote an interesting blog post on the conference, and his ideas for the future of EEBO-TCP. Martin was followed by Marie-Hélène Lay who provided a detailed exploration of how to deal with spelling variation in early modern French and English. Panel One was completed by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann who discussed the database she has created with Ben Burton, which offers early modern poetry marked up by form and meter. This first session gave a real sense of the careful and detailed development work currently being undertaken, based on EEBO-TCP materials, and of some of the challenges presented by using early modern materials for research.

Peter Auger opened the second panel, Early Modern Reception and Response, with a fascinating discussion of how EEBO-TCP has allowed him to explore early modern English responses to French poets. The TCP corpus has enabled Peter to build on earlier research by allowing him to identify additional sources. This sense of building on and reinforcing earlier research was itself reinforced in Simon Davies’ discussion of early modern demonology. Mary Erica Zimmer, like Peter and Simon, gave a clear sense of the kind of detailed and specialist work that the TCP enables in her talk on Spenser’s “Letter of the Authors”.

These stimulating panels were followed by a poster session, which showcased some of the projects which have used or are related to EEBO-TCP in significant ways. The poster session was, in a packed schedule, necessarily short, and the publication of the proceedings of the conference offers a welcome opportunity to ponder these projects at more length.  James Cummings illustrated the productive ways that EEBO-TCP materials can be enhanced and reused for new purposes. James also joined Ian Gadd, Giles Bergel, and Pip Willcox in a poster exploring a project which will be of great interest to EEBO-TCP users, the digitization of the Stationers’ Register. Jayne Henley provided a striking poster showing her work on editing texts in Welsh for EEBO-TCP. Jim Kuhn, Sarah Werner and Owen Williams of the Folger Shakespeare Library showed a poster focusing on their plans for interoperable digital editions of early modern drama. Judith Siefring’s final poster on SECT: Sustaining the EEBO-TCP Corpus in Transition, described the project’s focus on assessing the impact of the TCP corpus, for which all of the posters and panels at the conference have supplied such valuable input.

The third and final panel of the first day of the conference was a superb illustration of the ways in which the TCP is being used in teaching. Heather Froelich presented her paper, co-written with Richard J Whitt and Jonathan Hope, on the TextLab course run at the University of Strathclyde, which fosters collaborative working to explore text and language in detail. Mark Hutchings then spoke about his course which uses EEBO-TCP materials to teach students editing theory and practice. Leah Knight surveyed her ten years’ experience using the TCP in the classroom and the challenges that this has brought with it. This excellent panel, in its focus on pedagogy, provided a useful counterpoint to the impressive and detailed research work outlined earlier in the day.

Day Two of the conference opened with Panel Four, on the subject of the politics and practicalities of editing. Daniel Carey and Anders Ingram opened with an engaging paper on their work creating an edition of Richard Hackluyt’s Principal Navigations based on the EEBO-TCP transcription. Giles Bergel followed them with a timely and thought-provoking discussion on the politics and poetics of transcription. This very practical engagement with the challenges of digital editing was followed up by Michelle O’Callaghan and Alice Eardley’s presentation of their work creating digital editions for the Verse Miscellanies Online project. Sebastian Rahtz and James Cummings closed this fascinating session with an exploration of how they have worked to bring TCP encoding into line with more recent versions of the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines.

Panel Five concentrated on the work being done by the Corpus Research on Early Modern English (CREME) team at Lancaster University. Alistair Baron, Andrew Hardie, Paul Rayson, Stephen Pumfrey, Alison Findlay and Liz Oakley-Brown gave a series of papers exploring the potential of the TCP corpus for linguistic and semantic analysis, and its application in the classroom. These stimulating papers were extremely well-received by the conference audience.

The sixth and final panel of the conference, on Digital Research Methods, was opened by Jake Halford who discussed his work on the emergence of “new philosophy” in the seventeenth century. Jake explored how EEBO-TCP has helped him in his research, graciously suggested that hearing the work of others examined during the conference had opened new avenues for his own work. Helen Sonner then gave a very engaging paper on the popular construction of meaning in early modern print, tracing the meaning and development of the word “plantation”. Matthew Steggle closed the session with a charming discussion of how EEBO-TCP has enabled his work looking for “lost plays”, concentrating, for this paper, on the work of Thomas Dekker.

The conference was brought to a close with a summary and plenary discussion, led by the wonderful Emma Smith. Emma skilfully pulled together the themes of the conference, highlighting the range of work being carried out using EEBO-TCP and demonstrating the value of the conference in bringing scholars together to share their work and ideas. Emma led a discussion which considered how scholars can fully embrace the possibilities offered by digital technology, and how this changing digital landscape is prompting researchers and content-creators alike to think about research methodologies. How are research methods changing? How can scholars explain and make explicit their methodologies? What role can content-creators play in this process? This discussion of the changing nature of the research process, and of research goals, led on to a discussion of the role of libraries and in particular of rare book libraries.

By considering the state of the TCP in 2012, this conference enabled a stimulating exploration of the changing research landscape for scholars in the humanities and for those who endeavour to support such research. The important questions raised are ripe for further discussion.

This news provides an opportunity to reflect on the conference, where we were impressed by the enthusiasm and scholarship of the delegates, grateful for their feedback, and humbled by their commitment to continuing to work with and improve EEBO-TCP. The energy generated by their presentations and the surrounding discussion was infectious. Tweets from the conference have been Storified, and Martin Mueller has published a thorough and thoughtful report on the program on his blog. We invite you to reflect on these comments about the conference, with the full text of the papers at hand. We also look forward to sharing with you the reflections of two EEBO-TCP staff, who will be reporting out in two future posts. Stay tuned!

Conference delegates may still submit their papers to be added to the proceedings: contact eebotcp@bodleian.ox.ac.uk

The newly released texts are now available to EEBO-TCP partner institutions via the EEBO-TCP platforms hosted by the University of Michigan and University of Oxford. The new batch of texts will also be added to ProQuest’s EEBO platform in the next EEBO content update, scheduled for February 2013.

Want to know more about what’s new?

To view a complete list of all the new texts, try a bibliographic search for ’2012 November’ in the citation field.

Here’s a peek at a few items from this batch:

• Bernard Garter’s The tragicall and true historie which happened betwene two English louers (1565) is a verse work based on Arthur Brooke’s The tragicall historye of Romeus and Iuliet (1653). The latter was the first appearance of the Romeo and Juliet legend in English, influencing Garter, Shakespeare, and many others. (Shakespeare’s version of the play was first published in quarto in 1597.)
• Strange and wonderful news from Ireland: of a whale of a prodigious size, being eighty two foot long, cast ashore on the third of this instant February, near Dublin, and there exposed to publick view  / in a letter to a person of quality is exactly what is sounds like: a letter (published in a book) reporting on a whale cast ashore by a storm in Ireland:

In this fury, Leviathan expired, when the Assembly taking fresh Courage by this Death, laid Siege to the deserted Garrison. Engines are erected, and he is brought a shore, being in length Eighty Two Foot, the Tongue weighing above Six Hun∣dred Pound, as soft, but much bigger than a Feather-Bed. The Heart bigger and fatter than the Body of a great Ox, the Ribs and Bones like Beams, and the Teeth all Whale-bone, like the Rafters of a House meeting in Couples, but something closer, with white Beards like Wheat-Sheafs at the end of them, and the Tail like a chequer’d stript Scotch Plad, split in the middle, and spreading open on both sides. In the Mouth of which, being propt up with the mast of a Dublin Gibbard, ma∣ny People have been together.

• Two bills of mortality, compiled by the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks in 1603 and 1625, document the death toll in parishes throughout England, specifically looking at deaths attributed to plague.

In addition to publishing more than 4,000 new texts, with this release the TCP has also published 86 new ECCO-TCP texts. The conversion of these texts was funded by the University of Helsinki, which joined the project several years ago.

To obtain copies of the EEBO-TCP source files for local use, request digital text for a book that has not yet been converted by EEBO-TCP, or learn more about becoming an EEBO-TCP partner, please contact us at tcp-info@umich.edu.

One of the greatest pleasures of reviewing new texts for EEBO-TCP is the way in which it constantly confronts each of us with new perspectives on things we may feel we know so well as to be unquestionable. This can be profound (as in Becky’s recent blog post showing that ‘progressive’ attitudes to schooling shouldn’t be assumed to be uniquely modern), but can also begin as simply as stumbling across something oddly unfamiliar in an old use of an expression we still commonly repeat today.

Reviewing John Downame’s Foure Treatises Tending to Disswade all Christians from … the Abuses of Swearing, Drunkennesse, Whoredome, and Briberie (1609), my eye was caught by the following allusion: ‘…[A]s the common proverbe is, there are but twelve points in the law, and possession is as good as eleaven of them.’ Having grown up with the notion that ‘Possession is nine points of the law’ (that is, nine tenths), I was surprised, and began to wonder whether Downame had garbled his proverb, or whether it had simply shifted in time.

Certainly Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable (Millenium Edition, Revised by Adrian Room, p.932) supported the ‘nine points’ version, even going so far as to try to enumerate each of the nine.

The Oxford English Dictionary Online told a slightly different story. While favouring ‘nine points’ it acknowledged that ‘eleven’ was ‘formerly’ used as well, though one of its two entries dealing with this proverbial usage (within the definition of ‘possession, n.’) suggests that ‘eleven’ was used ‘hyperbolically’.

Nine of the eleven quotations the OED used to define this proverb in its ‘possession, n.’ context, dating between 1616 and 1998, followed the ‘nine points’ usage. The remaining two, from 1650 and 1712, suggested ‘eleven points’. By contrast, four of the nine quotations used to illustrate the same phrase within its definition of ‘point, n.1’ (ranging from 1639 to 1792) favour the ‘eleven point’ usage, with an equal number (ranging between 1616 and 1991) holding to ‘nine points’. (The ninth quotation states that ‘Possession is ninety-nine points of Lunacy law’; the OED editors’ note that this number is being used ‘hyperbolically’ is here harder to second guess.)

What begins to emerge from these sources, then, is a sense that ‘nine points’ has clearly come to dominate modern usage, but that ‘twelve points’ seems to have had some kind of currency in an earlier age. But how to pin down this hunch into a more concrete understanding of how this proverb was used in the early modern period?

Using the ‘Proximity Search’ feature available via the TCP’s full-text search interface, it is possible to design a simple search that quickly generates several dozen examples of this proverb’s usage from across the whole span of the seventeenth century – without filtering out either the ‘nine’ or ‘eleven points’ versions. This is a sufficiently large sample with which to begin to determine with more confidence the dominant form in the period to 1700.

Using the default search operator ‘near’, and changing the default proximity range from ‘40’ to ‘120’ characters, a user can search the whole corpus of over 40,000 texts in seconds, identifying all of the occasions in which all three of the words ‘points’, ‘law’, and ‘possession’ occurred close to one another.

This search on September 13, 2012 resulted in 52 matches in 48 records. (Phase I-only partners conducting the same search would only have discovered 38 matches in 34 records.) In other words, the three words appeared close to one another in 48 of the books printed in the EEBO period so far captured by the TCP.  The additional four matches indicate that in some books the three words coincided more than once.

Sorting these results by date from earliest to latest (‘date ascending’) reveals that the earliest text to fall within this search is Sir Thomas Ridley’s A View of the Civile and Ecclesiastical Law (1607) and the latest is an anonymous treatise on The Law of Ejectments, printed for John Deebe in 1700.

In fact, both of these turn out to be false positives – although all three search terms occur within 120 characters of one another in the texts, they do not form the proverb in question. The earliest (though numerically-unspecific) allusion to the proverb itself therefore turns out to be an account in John Taylor’s All the Workes of John Taylor the Water-Poet (1630) (p.137) of a man named John Rowse who is driven to despair and eventual murder as a result of losing his land to a supposed friend. The friend’s declaration ‘And seeing that I have all these especial points of the Law … and a sure possession, take what course you will’ is taken by Rowse as irrefutable, triggering his terrible spiral.

The latest allusion to this phrase uncovered by this search meanwhile is a translation of The Fables of Young Aesop, printed by Benjamin Harris in 1700. This concludes the fable of ‘The Crocodile and the Dogs’ with the moral: ‘In fine, Consider, when thy Table is spread, if thou goest to it with an unsavoury Heart, thou dost not know but the Devil may be in the first Morsel and Choak thee: and then thou’lt remember this common Sentence, Possession is Eleven Points of the Law!’ (p.77)

Returning to the question that initially provoked this search: whether the understood proportion of ‘possession’ was ‘nine points’ or ‘eleven’: of the 39 hits which are not false positives – and which therefore do positively reference this proverb – 36 identify ‘eleven points’ as the magic number, with only three agreeing with the modern convention of ‘nine’. It is possible to interrogate these results further in order to try to assess whether (for example) the beginning of the shift to modern usage might be detectable here, but even at this point the evidence of this corpus can be taken to strongly suggest that possession was far more likely to be assumed to be eleven points of the law before 1700, than nine.

The practical application of this specific example may be limited, but it demonstrates one way in which the EEBO-TCP corpus allows researchers to re-examine the understood contexts and significance of key words and phrases in a way which is both rapid and wide-ranging. The occurrences of this proverb uncovered by the search discussed above come from a broad range of genres including politics, philosophy, theology, astrology, poetry, and travel. Most of them are brief, passing references toward which a simple catalogue search could not possibly have pointed, but collectively they form a cohesive and potentially convincing body of usage, which in turn can form the basis of broader questions, such as what epistemological reasons might lie beneath this apparent shift from a duodecimal to a decimal scale of legal weight.

On Monday and Tuesday, September 17-18, delegates will hear more than 25 papers, along with a number of posters, presenting various research applications for the EEBO-TCP corpus. Check out the program for a sneak peek at what is to come, and follow @TCPStream and @OxfordEEBOTCP on Twitter to join the conversation next week—whether you’ll be with us in Oxford or not!

Facing pages from "The childs book and youths book: in two parts. : The first teaching an easie and delightful way to read true English ... : The second containing a method for spelling, a catechism, a confession of faith, a copy book, a perpetual almanack" (1672)

A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching Schoole, Charles Hoole’s fascinating treatise on grammar school education, takes a surprisingly progressive stance on pedagogy that might sound familiar even in today’s classrooms: Not everyone learns at the same pace or in the same way. It is the responsibility of the teacher to shape the lesson to the student. And games work better than beatings.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, by describing his approach in contrast with more traditional methods, Hoole “not only sets out his views on what education should be but also paints a vivid picture of education as it actually was in the mid-seventeenth century.”

Hoole writes,

THe usual way to begin with a child, when he is first brought to Schoole, is to teach him to know his letters in the Horn-book, where he is made to run over all the letters in the Alphabet or Christ cross-row both forwards & backwards, until he can tel any one of them, which is pointed at, and that in the Englishcharacter.

This course we see hath been very effectual in a short time, with some more ripe witted children, but others of a slower apprehension (as the most and best commonly are) have been thus learning a whole year together, (and though they have been much chid and beaten too for want of heed) could scarce tell six of their letters at twelve moneths end, who, if they had been taught in a way more agreeable to their meane apprehensions [...] would doubtlesse have learned as cheerfully, if not as fast as the quickest

Hoole goes on to describe “sundry ways that have been taken to make a childe know his letters readily, out of which the discreet Teacher may chuse what is most likely to suit with his Learner.”

The greatest trouble at the first entrance of children is to teach them how to know their letters one from another, when they see them in the book altogether; for the greatnesse of their number and variety of shape do puzle young wits to difference them, and the sence can but be intent upon one single object at once, so as to take its impression, and commit it to the imagination and memory. Some have therefore begun but with one single letter, and after they have shewed it to the childe in the Alpha∣bet, have made him to finde the same any where else in the book, till he knew that perfectly; and then they have proceeded to another in like manner, and so gone through the rest.

Some have contrived a piece of ivory with twenty four flats or squares, in every one of which was engraven a several letter, and by playing with a childe in throwing this upon a table, and shewing him the letter onely which lay uppermost, have in few dayes taught him the whole Alphabet.

Some have got twenty four pieces of ivory cut in the shape of dice, with a letter engraven upon each of them, and with these they have played at vacant hours with a childe, till he hath known them all distinctly. They begin first with one, then with two, afterwards with more letters at once, as the childe got knowledge of them. To teach him likewise to spell, they would place consonants before or after a vowel, and then joyn more letters together so as to make a word, and sometimes divide it into syl∣lables, to be parted or put together; now this kind of letter sport may be profitably permitted among you beginers in a School in stead of ivory, they may have white bits of wood, or small shreads of paper or past-board, or parchment with a letter writ upon each to play withall amongst themselves.

Some have made pictures in a little book or upon a scroll of paper wrapt upon two sticks within a box of iceing-glass, and by each picture have made three sorts of that letter, with which its name beginneth; but those being too many at once for a childe to take notice on, have proved not so useful as was intended.

Some likewise have had pictures and letters printed in this manner on the back side of a pack of cards, to entice children, that naturally love that sport, to the love of learning their books.

Some have writ a letter in a great character upon a card, or chalked it out upon a trencher, and by telling a child what it was, and letting him strive to make the like, have imprinted it quickly in his memory, and so the rest one after another

The most colorful example is that of a father teaching the alphabet to a toddler, using a device that seems to be half Viewmaster, half See ‘n’ Say.

One having a Son of two years and a half old, that could but even go about the house, and utter some few gibberish words in a broken manner; observing him one day above the rest to be busied about shells and sticks, and such like toys, which himself had laid together in a chair, and to misse any one that was taken from him, he saw not how, and to seek for it about the house; became very desireous to make experiment what that childe might presently attain to in point of learning; Thereupon he devised a little wheel, with all the Capital Romane letters made upon a paper to wrap round about it, and fitted it to turn in little a round box, which had a hole so made in the side of it, that onely one letter might be seen to peep out at once; This he brought to the childe, & showed him onely the letter O, and told him what it was; The childe being overjoyed with his new gamball, catcheth the box out of his Fathers hand, and run’s with it to his play fellow a year younger then himself, and in his broken language tell’s him there was an O, an O; And when the other asked him where, he said, in a hole, in a hole, and shewed it him; which the lesser childe then took such notice of, as to know it againe ever after from all the other letters.

These examples of children’s eagerness to learn, Hoole emphasizes, put the responsibility back on teachers to use an appropriate method:

By this instance you may see what a propensity there is in nature betimes to learning, could but the Teachers apply themselves to their young Scholars tenuity; and how by proceeding in a cleare & facil method, that all may apprehend, every one may benefit more or less by degrees.

By the way, according to Hoole, the trials and tribulations of the unappreciated teacher were not much different than they are today:

“But alas, we that wholly undergoe the burden of  School-teaching, can tell by our own experience, how laborious it is both to minde and body, to be continually intent upon the work, and how irksome it is (especially to a man of a quiet temper) to have so many unwilling provocations unto passion; what good parts for learning, and right qualification in all points of behavour is required of us; how small our yearly stipend is, and how uncertain all our other incomes are. Again, we call to minde the too much indulgency of some Parents, who neither love to blame their childrens untowardnesse, nor suffer the Master to correct it”

Good luck to all students and teachers facing exciting new challenges and opportunities this semester!

NB: While anyone will be able to view the catalog record and table of contents for this book, as well as search its text, only affiliates of EEBO-TCP Partner institutions will be able to click through to the full text.